Yes vote from me. Just knowing that this information is more visible to moderators might act as a deterrent to serial downvoters and puppeteers. I think we'd probably need to establish some guidelines on what action to take in each case.
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Bill the LizardJul 13 '11 at 22:31

9

@Bill I have a handy flowchart for deciding what to do in a whole host of SE problems. All the arrows end in "ban them"
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Michael MrozekJul 13 '11 at 22:52

6 Answers
6

Note that suspicious vote patterns are already available to moderators, from the Links tab. This doesn't show quite as much detail as this feature request would, but it does give a sense for if a particular user is voting on another user a lot.

Community could raise a flag when a user crosses the threshold to be on that list. Most mods don't seem to know about or regularly check that list, so if it were automatically brought to our attention when somebody gets on the list, then that would have the same effect as this feature request.

I think increasing visibility of that list is a good idea no matter what. I find that I check it when I remember, but it's easy to forget about it, since it's a bit off the beaten path. A link from the flag page or main mod tools page would be handy.
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Anna Lear♦Jul 14 '11 at 3:29

Yes, this. I want more visibility for the trigger events.
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jcolebrandJul 14 '11 at 17:13

Should it also flag multiple votes of one person by another in a short time? Either upvotes or downvotes, since both are equally suspect.

Up votes should have a significantly higher bar, I think. Here's why:

Truly terrible posters tend to be easily recognizable as such, and as such should have no trouble acquiring down votes from myriad sources; serially down voting a bunch of things already at low score isn't adding much value.

A single person serially down-voting someone who is a merely mediocre-to-poor poster is more likely to be a grudge; there's no shortage of mediocre posts to vote down if one is inclined to enforcing high standards, so going after one person is frivolous at best.

On the other hand, there are plenty of excellent posters who focus on niche topics; there may be a limited number of people who can appreciate their posts, and it's easy in a bout of enthusiasm to go "hey, that was neat, I wonder what else this person has posted?" and end up voting them up repeatedly for wholly correct reasons. Perhaps I'm biased (spending most of my time in niche tags) but I care more about rewarding high-quality contributors than catching the low-level abuses this could be mistaken for.

I would imagine that egregious cases, e.g. multiple sock-puppets active over an extended period of time voting up the puppeteer, are rather easy to distinguish from borderline cases.

One negative is that so far community flags are visible to 10k users; I think this particular one should be moderator-only.

Yes, for the simple reason that most people have some idea of "fairness" that they tend to apply without thinking. Publicising a list of serial voting targets is very likely to result in a steady stream of pointless "compensation" votes, most of which would probably be picked up as suspicious as well. Hooray for feedback loops! Insert obvious "stack overflow" joke here, etc. No, I don't think 10k users in general can be expected to know better, unfortunately.

The threshold is also tricky to deal with; should it only take into account a single day? Should 30 votes over two days be flagged? Should 15 votes in one day? What about 10?

A much better heuristic would probably be to look at the sequence of pages the suspicious voter visited, if that were tracked (which it probably isn't, at least not in a useful way for this purpose). Serial voting requires finding things to vote; there are lots of ways to do that, and almost none of them involve looking through lists of questions or searching based on a topic.

Of course, any such heuristics should probably be placed in the same neither-confirm-nor-deny category as the quality filter and such, to prevent gaming (I can think of at least three or four easy-to-implement heuristics off the top of my head, but the less said the better).

do you see the initial point here as serially upvoted or just highly upvoted? highly upvoted is already exposed on the users profile anyways. Just curious which way you were going there.
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jcolebrandJul 14 '11 at 15:56

@jcolebrand: Er, sorry, I'm not quite certain what you're asking, probably because I need another cup of coffee. At no point was I talking about highly-upvoted users, though; my argument is that there are valid reasons to do what looks like serial upvoting on a user with low average scores, if they contributed a lot of high-quality material on an obscure topic.
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McCannotJul 14 '11 at 16:05

Truly terrible posters tend to be easily recognizable as such, and as such should have no trouble acquiring down votes from myriad sources; serially down voting a bunch of things already at low score isn't adding much value. <-- seemed like you weren't focusing on the serial part of upvote behavior following talk of upvotes at the beginning of your post.
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jcolebrandJul 14 '11 at 16:21

I would imagine that egregious cases, e.g. multiple sock-puppets active over an extended period of time voting up the puppeteer, are rather easy to distinguish from borderline cases. fwiw, there are tools in the system to detect this
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jcolebrandJul 14 '11 at 16:21

@jcolebrand: Ok, now I see. I was arguing that there should be a higher bar for catching serial upvotes, and the first two points are trying to justify the lower bar for serial downvotes. You're right, that is kind of confusing. Sorry! Here's a summary: "serial downvotes are probably either useless or unfair, some serial upvoting is legit, excessive upvote abuse is probably obvious". Does that help? And yes, I figured that upvote puppets are probably caught by other means as well.
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McCannotJul 14 '11 at 16:26

Should it also flag multiple votes of one person by another in a short time? Either upvotes or downvotes, since both are equally suspect.

One negative is that so far community flags are visible to 10k users; I think this particular one should be moderator-only.

Since there are a lot of times where people can say "hey I think I was serially downvoted! Wah!" (and I've been one of them) then I think it would be good that a 10ker could check the record and say "yes, there was a flag for that" and then it's up to a mod to investigate if that's a problem.

Do I also see potential for abuse? Yes.

Do I also see people begging to know what flags their own accounts show? Yes. Do I think any meta questions posted about that should be closed straightaway? Yes. That's something better handled through an email or perhaps in chat.

On the one hand, it could be looked at as a deterrent for excessive upvoting or serial downvoting (i.e., bad voting patterns). But on the other hand, doesn't the daily vote-fraud-protection scripts already handle that?

I have faith in the mods that they'll do the right thing, but this is not something that they should have to police, only the higher-ups. Yeah, this may mean that it would mean less eyes to look out for this but so what? It's only ever really a problem when a normal user notices and reports it in meta or a team member sees how ever they see it.

I'm leaning towards a no here unless there's data to back up the idea that this is a major issue that's happening every day.

This would be more on detecting and flagging the vote patterns instead of actually showing which posts were voted on. There is still some layer of abstraction.
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randomJul 14 '11 at 0:46

To some degree, serial down voting is inherently a problem, because it's toxic to a healthy community atmosphere. A relatively new user who gets a pile of unjustified revenge votes when the rep hit from that is still noticeable could feel very discouraged from further participation.
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McCannotJul 14 '11 at 1:42

I think we have to be careful about automating things which could be triggered by legitimate user activity. I'm far more likely to read and thus vote on my partners questions and answers than any other individual on Stack Exchange, but that doesn't make me her sock puppet. I still apply the same voting criteria to her posts that I would apply to anyone else.

It wouldn't be information that would always need to be acted upon, but it brings any potential activity to watch into the light more. It doesn't have to be a 100% accurate flag to be useful to moderators.

I love improvements that increase the organization and make finding moderator only work easier.